<B>WTT Enters Public Arena</B>
By Cheryl Rosen
<I>Dallas</I> - WorldTravel Technologies has a new name and a new financial structure as a publicly traded company. Today, the well-known supplier of the ResAssist online booking and the CoRRe travel agency quality control systems, became TRX, trading under the symbol TRXI.
While for now the name change will be the biggest shift customers will see, TRX president Trip Davis outlined a broader vision for the company, as a provider of "front-to-back solutions for business-to-business and business-to-consumer travel e-commerce," with links to the GDSs, customer relationship management systems and quality control software.
At some point in the future--though not this year--TRX hopes to extend the reach of its fulfillment, technology and data services beyond the travel industry altogether.
"Our vision is to exploit the explosion of e-commerce and the need for comprehensive Internet-enabled customer service," Davis told Business Travel News. "There absolutely is the vision that we could do this outside the travel industry but, for this year, there's a lot of runway in the travel industry."
TRX's base of corporate customers now books 2 percent to 4 percent of its trips online, but Davis envisions that number increasing "by orders of magnitude in the next few years, and the scalability and support needed to handle that will be very different from today. The key will be consistency in real-time access to accurate data no matter what the interface, and next-generation customer service that integrates superior technology solutions with best-in-class services at every touch point."
Already, TRX has seen its financial structures change as the industry moves away from software sales and toward service bureaus that host sites and charge transaction fees. Three-fourths of TRX's business already has shifted to a service bureau model, and the plan is to "move further in that direction" going forward.
WorldTravel Technologies began as a spinoff of WorldTravel Partners in 1997. While the two have been separate companies, WTP management has held the majority of shares. Those shares now will be diluted by public ownership and by a 20 percent stake in TRX by U.K.-based travel agency Hogg Robinson (<I>BTN</I>, Nov. 15, 1999).
Hogg Robinson chairman David Radcliffe will hold a seat on the new TRX board of directors, as will WorldTravel Partners' chairman Jack Alexander, and president and CEO of Pegasus Systems Inc. John Davis, who in August 1997 led his company's IPO (<I>BTN</I>, Sept. 8, 1997).
WorldTravel Technologies has had three lines of business: Travel Technologies Group, the software development arm; Online Fulfillment Services, which provides customer service and ticketing for Microsoft's Expedia and the Continental and US Airways Web sites; and International Software Products, a travel management data warehousing company acquired in 1999.
All three product lines will continue now under the TRX umbrella, with WTT's Steve Reynolds heading technology services, Chris Brittin of ISP heading data services, and Scott Hancock, long-time Cendant executive, pulling double duty as executive vice president of the company and acting general manager of fulfillment services.
New business lines under development include co-management of dedicated facilities for travel agencies--a fit with today's ever-popular outsourcing story.
"The top travel agencies are looking at potentially outsourcing everything or developing e-commerce applications internally," Davis said. "We've looked at five reservation centers that agencies either will close, or they will bring us in to assume the people and the facility and transform them into higher-volume, lower-touch service centers."
There also is talk of a joint venture with Hogg Robinson beyond its initial investment to "bring our three services to their corporate clients and suppliers in Europe," Davis said.
Ralph Manaker, who has been co-president of WorldTravel Partners with Danny Hood, now will drop that role to become TRX's full-time executive vice president and general counsel. "He's our deal maker," Davis said, crediting him with bringing in the Hogg Robinson investment.
David Fromal came aboard in November as executive vice president of sales and marketing, and ISP founder Susan Hopley was named senior vice president of corporate strategy. A search for a CFO is under way.
The S-1 that TRX filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission in preparation for its initial public offering shows revenues of $26.57 million in 1999, an increase of 86 percent over the $14.3 million WorldTravel Technologies took in during 1998. The S-1 attributes the change "primarily to an increase in our transaction volume, which rose from 2.4 million transactions in 1998 to 6.8 million in 1999.